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Remember when you grew the bread mold? If you still have it, you are ready to do this week’s experiment. We are going to take acloser look at the mold and see what it’s about!

All you’ll need for this part is a magnifying glass or microscope, a toothpick and some water. If you have a microscope, you can use aglass slide and a glass slide cover. If you don’t have one, you’ll be fine with just a magnifying glass.

Here’s what you do:

Take the really moldy piece of bread out of the jar and look at all of the different mold colonies through the magnifying glass. If you havea microscope, you can take a piece of the mold and place it on the glass slide and cover it with the slide cover. Look at the mold under a high-power lens. If you don’t have a microscope you can just continue to look at the mold through the magnifying glass. The bread mold is also called “rhizopus.” It looks like a bunch of small black dotsconnected with silky white threads. The white threads actually create and spread the small dots. These little dots are spore-producing organs. As these organs grow, hundreds and hundreds of tiny sporesfrom each of these dots are spread around by the movement of the air.

Take the toothpick and dip it into the water and then touch the wet end to the black dots. Look closely and you will see many more spores. Each of the black dots contains about fifty thousand spores which get released into the air. They get released just like a dandelion spreads seeds by the blowing wind. Each spore will sprout and create a mold colony if the correct conditions are met. You may also see common mold or “mucor” growing on the bread too. It looks like spots ofdifferent colors. If you look through a magnifying glass, you will see that the groupings look like veins of a leaf. You may be able to seepink, black, gray or blue-green molds on the bread!